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A Bigg’s killer whale passes by the author’s boat near Protection Island. Photo by Eric Wagner.

Publish or perish the thought: Orcas, seals, and a curious scientist

In 2022, more than three million scientific papers were published in about thirty thousand journals. This represented something like a 9% increase over the year before, and a 47% increase since 2016. “Academic publishing has a problem,” wrote Mark A. Hanson, the biologist at the University of Exeter who compiled these figures. “The last few years have seen an exponential growth in the number of peer-reviewed journal articles, which has not been matched by the training of new researchers who can vet those articles. Editors are reporting difficulties in recruiting qualified peer reviewers, and scientists are overwhelmed by the volume of new articles being published.” (The irony being that Hanson and his coauthors shared their conclusions in a study published in 2023, titled, naturally, “The strain on scientific publishing.”) 

This challenge of overabundance, Hanson and his colleagues note, is unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon. Papers are professional currency in so many ways, and for so many parties. Publishers are incentivized to push out as many articles as they can, subject to clearing some threshold of quality, to maximize revenue. Funders decide what projects to support based in part on an applicant’s publication history. For researchers, then, the Publish Or Perish monster is still alive and well. How often have I heard scientists talk half in jest of the LPU, or Least Publishable Unit—the barest amount of data, that is, that can pass the muster of peer-review to become a paper on a CV? 

There are, of course, more charitable readings of the urge to publish. Scientists like to share their work with their colleagues. It can be an exchange of wonder. I recently published a paper (on petrels — far afield of the Salish Sea) motivated in part by something neat I just happened to see. Especially in organismal biology, which can have its roots in a childhood fascination with living beings, a paper can be way to codify feelings of I want to tell you about something amazing! into a professional, publishable fact. 

That said, three million papers a year is a lot of papers. Obviously not every single one is relevant to every scientist, and speaking for myself, I do not often peruse, for instance, the organic chemistry literature. (Maybe I should?) But even in subdisciplines more aligned to my interests, the research output is a formidable stack of hundreds of papers. I won’t embarrass myself here trying to guess how many or few of those worthy articles I read, but sometimes it is interesting to think of the circumstances that might bring a paper to my attention. Often they have little to do with the paper itself. 

A day in the field

Early one morning in mid-July I dragged myself down to the small marina on Protection Island, a national wildlife refuge near Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula. I was with Scott Pearson, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and it was a little after 5:30 a.m., the sun just starting to emerge from a hazy mix of the marine layer and wildfire smoke. Once aboard the R/V Puffin, Pearson steered us through the narrow channel that leads from the refuge to the wider world. 

We were bound for Smith Island, about ten miles north. Smith, itself a part of the San Juan Islands National Wildlife Refuge, has one of the Salish Sea’s largest remaining colonies of tufted puffins. Largest, of course, is a relative term. The species is state-listed as endangered, its breeding population having declined by an order of magnitude since the early 20th Century. More than half of its former colonies, especially in these inland waters, are now puffin-less. Other sites, like Protection Island, are thought to have at best a single pair, maybe two. At Smith, we hoped to find at least a dozen pairs and identify their burrows on the island’s northern bluffs. 

“A lot of seals in here this morning,” Pearson commented as Puffin puttered down the channel. Protection Island is known more for its birds, but female seals and their pups clustered on the cobbled shore, or near the breakwaters. I guessed there were at least fifteen or twenty mom-pup pairs. 

An inlet on the shore of Protection Island.

Puffin passed the breakwater and Pearson was reaching for the throttle when suddenly we heard a strong pfffwuh. It was close. 

Pearson froze. “Woah,” he said. “That sure sounded like whale breath. We both scanned our immediate environs. The water was flat calm but the sun’s bright glare made it hard to see. Then we heard it again, now in quick succession: Pfffwuh! Pfffwuh!

Pearson cut the engines and Puffin slowed to a drift. Pearson pointed east. “Over there!” he said. There were three orcas: two females and a male, at least judging by the shape of their dorsal fins. One of the females was fairly young if the size of her fin was any indication. All three were somewhere between fifty and one hundred yards away. Their fins cut through the water, which in the rising sun seemed to be on fire. 

Despite the distance, we could tell, too, that these were not salmon-favoring southern resident orcas, which are endangered. No, these were another ecotype that frequents these waters, the mammal-eating orcas called transients, or Bigg’s killer whales. Their prevalence in Puget Sound has risen in recent years, while the southern residents spend less and less time here and their numbers drop for a host of reasons. 

The most obvious clues as to these orcas’ ecotype were the seals two were holding in their jaws. We could see the seals’ heads flopping around: one large and one smaller, most likely a mother and her pup. The mother was dead, or nearly so. The pup was still alive. The orcas seemed to be taking their time with it. “Might be eating it,” Pearson said. “Or just playing with it.”  

Pearson had his camera out and was taking pictures, while I snapped valiantly away with my smartphone. He has a large lens, good for clear shots of distant phenomena, like puffins standing in front of a burrow on a bluff. The orcas were giving him a hard time. “They’re almost too close,” he said at one point. He flicked through the images on his viewfinder and grimaced. “Not all of these will be fit for public consumption,” he said. I could only imagine. Even from where I was I could see bloody bits and pieces of seal. Other seals watched the proceedings from the safety of the beach. Not to anthropomorphize overmuch, but I got a distinct There but for the grace of God… sense from their fixed gazes. 

A confluence of papers

Pearson and I watched as the orcas went about their business. Perhaps it was a distancing mechanism from the spectacle of dismemberment, but a part of me started to relate what I was seeing to relevant publications. It was like the encounter was a shaft of light and the literature a prism out of which two beams were separated and projected, one for each of the players. 

The first was on orca taxonomy. Orcas may be black and white, but their species status is not. They are found all over the world, but officially scientists consider them a single species, Orcinus orca. Various differences in habit or appearance are consigned to subspecies or ecotype status. 

This has had conservation implications for the southern resident orcas in particular. Since they are not a separate species, federal managers trying to list them under the Endangered Species Act decided to treat them like a distinct population segment, akin to a particular run of salmon in a particular watershed. But there had been rumblings that the residents and these transients were substantially different enough to be considered separate, and last spring, Phil Morin an evolutionary geneticist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center was lead author on a paper arguing as much. Here on the Pacific coast, he and his colleagues wrote, multiple lines of evidence (genetic, morphological, behavioral, cultural) support designating the residents one species, and the mammal-eating ecotype we were watching, also called Bigg’s killer whales (after Michael Bigg, the Canadian scientist who first described the differences between these and the residents), another. 

“We started to ask this question 20 years ago, but we didn’t have much data, and we did not have the tools that we do now,” Morin said in a press release from NOAA. “Now we have more of both, and the weight of the evidence says these are different species.” The Taxonomy Committee of the Marine Mammal Society did not agree, however. At their annual review a couple of months later, members of the committee instead voted to make the resident and Bigg’s killer whales named subspecies. The vote was close; although a majority of the committee voted to make the orcas new species, they were two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for the measure to pass.

The second paper was on harbor seal distribution and abundance in the Salish Sea. Seal populations here have skyrocketed in recent years, with ambiguous effects on local threatened salmon populations. Using twenty years of data, Jamie Brusa and her colleagues (including Pearson) looked at what physical features or marine conditions corresponded to higher numbers of harbor seals in the water. Brusa, an ecologist at NOAA, found that physical features tended to matter more than conditions. Whether the sea surface temperature was high or low did not have a measurable effect on whether or not harbor seals were seen swimming around; but proximity to sheltered rocky shores or human-built riprap did. 

The findings had taken the researchers somewhat by surprise. Brusa said she had expected marine conditions—temperature, salinity, primary productivity—to matter at least a little, given their importance to the seal’s major prey species. She suspected the time window she had used for those variables—a thirty-day average—may not have been enough capture meaningful differences. Or maybe it was just harder to detect effects on fish farther up the food web where the seals were, since they can eat a wide variety of things that themselves might prefer a range of marine conditions. But watching the orcas and the seals, I could think of another reason why seals might want to make sure they were always just a short, quick swim from safety—one that spoke to their own awareness of their relative position in the world as predators, as prey.   

I thought of how I had become aware of those different publications: through Google alerts I had set up, from a mass email from this or that agency or lab, from a listserv I happen to be on. When I had seen their titles and scanned their abstracts, they had not seemed to me necessarily related. Now I understood how mistaken I had been. The authors might not go to the same conferences or publish in the same journals, but at Protection Island their works converged dramatically in time and space, the disciplinary boundaries between them blurred, their results rendered in the sharpest of focus. 

An orca approaches the boat. Photo by Eric Wagner.

A curious orca

The larger female orca broke away from her little group and dove, disappearing for perhaps a quarter of a minute. When she surfaced she was near the Puffin. I am not an expert on orca behavior, but I know curiosity when I see it, and she seemed intent on checking us out. She swam languidly, and as she got closer to Puffin I remembered those orcas in Spain that had taken to attacking and sometimes sinking small boats. I could see her full shape in the water, the flex of her flukes as she swam. At one point she was so close that I felt I could reach out and touch her. She breathed a couple of times, her exhalations a cloud against the rising sun. The moment was so quiet, almost disconcertingly so, juxtaposed as it was against the agony and terror of the seals her two companions were in the midst of dispatching. Then she turned and left us. She had seen what she needed to see. 

Pearson and I stayed for a few more minutes. The orcas finished what they were up to and then swam under us, or around us, before resurfacing some distance west of us. Slowly the space between human and cetacean increased, the orcas moving on. Also the puffins of Smith Island were calling. It was time for us to leave. 

Pearson started the engines and moved the throttle to its lowest setting, just above idle. Puffin moved away from the island. When we were sufficiently far from the orcas, Pearson opened the throttle and we roared away. We did not say much for a few minutes, but rather let the encounter marinate: the stillness of the morning, the necessary violence of predation, the sensation of having been carefully appraised by a non-human intelligence. Some orcas had eaten some seals in the Salish Sea. Was it worth writing up? Probably not. But that didn’t mean it was worthless.

Works cited, whether directly or indirectly:

Esteban R, López A, de los Rios ÁG, Ferreira M, Martinho F, Méndez‐Fernandeza P, Andréu E, García‐Gómez JC, Olaya‐Ponzone L, Espada‐Ruiz R, Gil‐Vera FJ. 2022. Killer whales of the Strait of Gibraltar, an endangered subpopulation showing a disruptive behavior. Marine Mammal Science 38:1699–1709.

Graham BA, Hipfner JM, Rojek NA, Stephensen SW, Burg TM. 2023. Tufted Puffins exhibit low levels of genetic differentiation among breeding colonies in North America. Ornithological Applications 125(3):duad023.

Hanson MA, Barreiro PG, Crosetto P, Brockington D. 2023. The strain on scientific publishing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15884.

Hart CJ, Kelly RP, Pearson SF. 2018. Will the California Current lose its nesting tufted puffins? PeerJ 6:e4519.

Morin PA, McCarthy ML, Fung CW, Durban JW, Parsons KM, Perrin WF, Taylor BL, Jefferson TA, Archer FI. 2024. Revised taxonomy of eastern North Pacific killer whales (Orcinus orca): Bigg’s and resident ecotypes deserve species status. Royal Society Open Science 11(3):231368.

Pearson SF, Keren I, Hodum PJ, et al. 2023. Range-wide changes in the North American Tufted Puffin Fratercula cirrhata breeding population over 115 years. Bird Conservation International 33:e24. doi:10.1017/S0959270922000193

Tennessen, JB, Holt MM, Wright BM, Hanson MB, Emmons CK, Giles DA, Hogan JT, Thornton SJ, Deecke VB. 2024. Males miss and females forgo: Auditory masking from vessel noise impairs foraging efficiency and success in killer whales. Global Change Biology 30: e17490 https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17490

Wagner EL, Rebstock GA, Boersma PD. 2024. A fearful scourge to the penguin colonies: Southern giant petrel (Macronectes giganteus) predation on living Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) may be more common than assumed. Ecology and Evolution 4(4):e11258.

Wagner EL, Pearson SF, Good TP, Hodum PJ, Buhle ER, Schrimpf MB. 2024. Resilience to a severe marine heatwave at two Pacific seabird colonies. Marine Ecology Progress Series 737:101-20.

Eric Wagner is a staff writer with the Puget Sound Institute. He has a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Washington and is the author of Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish, Penguins in the Desert, and After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens. His essays and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, Orion, and Smithsonian, among other places.